Field
This invention relates generally to a method for providing air traffic controlled flight of a large number of commercial drones within an air traffic controlled space around an airport and, more particularly, to a method for providing air traffic controlled flight of a large number of commercial drones within an air traffic controlled space around an airport that includes providing an outbound corridor from a carrier facility out of the air traffic controlled space that does not allow any other air traffic to fly therein, allowing the drones to fly through the outbound corridor to leave the air traffic controlled space from the facility without requiring air traffic control, providing an inbound corridor through the air traffic controlled space from outside of the air traffic controlled space to the carrier facility that is separate from the outbound corridor, and allowing the drones to enter the air traffic controlled space through the inbound corridor to return to the carrier facility without requiring air traffic control.
Discussion
Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones that are either remotely controlled or programmed to fly to a certain location under on-board battery power are becoming more and more prevalent. These drones have a number of purposes and features and typically employ cameras and/or other detectors for providing images. One proposed use of such drones is as a package delivery device, where small relatively light-weight packages are delivered from a distribution center or other facility operated by a carrier to a household or business. The drone is programmed with the delivery address or GPS coordinates of the delivery location and through GPS technology and vision capabilities flies to that location where it lands, releases the package and then returns to the distribution center to be recharged and be available to deliver another package. The various flight control, object avoidance, safety, privacy and other logistics of such a package delivery system is currently being worked out so as to make the system viable.
Commercial carriers currently deliver a large volume of packages and other goods from various warehouses and other locations to an airport proximate the warehouse, which depending on where the package is going, are flown to an airport near that location on large cargo planes. For certain of these airports, a very high volume of commercial cargo will thus congregate. A facility operated by the carrier at the airport then sorts the packages based on their final destination so that groups of the packages can be delivered together. From there, the sorted packages are delivered by trucks and other vehicles to other warehouses, where the packages are delivered to their final destination by other, typically smaller, trucks. It is this final delivery leg of the package journey that commercial drones are currently being contemplated for delivering the packages to their final destination. In an alternate contemplated scenario, the truck that includes the sorted packages from the carrier facility at the airport drives along a certain route depending on the final destination of the packages in the truck, and drones periodically remove single packages from the truck when the truck is close to the packages final destination, where the drone then delivers the package to that destination and returns to the truck.
In the above described scenarios there would be some cost efficacy by removing the leg of the delivering system where the packages are driven from the airport on a truck to the warehouse where they are distributed by the drones by allowing the drones to deliver the packages directly from the airport. However, the main issue for being able to deliver light weight packages on drones from an airport is control of the air space around the airport. Particularly, even a small number of drones flying around an airport would need to be controlled so as to not interfere of the other air traffic in that area.